In our new Marketing Voices series, we invite exciting digital marketing professionals to join the conversation. This month’s guest post is by Nick Rojas, an experienced business consultant and writer living in Los Angeles and Chicago. Nick has consulted small and medium-sized enterprises for over twenty years and has contributed articles to Visual.ly, Entrepreneur, and TechCrunch.

It’s no secret that startups, small businesses, and even one-man entrepreneurial operations all share a need to invest in digital marketing. While search engine optimization and excellent content go a long way towards creating growth, social media cannot be ignored if you want to jumpstart your business’s future and start connecting with your audience in an effective way. More

Here’s a great infographic by Adobe that shows the value each social media platform could provide when it comes to traffic generation, SEO, customer communication and brand awareness. When it comes to B2B, LinkedIn is way more important, but still there’s a lot of valuable information here.

When I was single, one of the best pieces of dating advice I ever got was to let the other person speak through the whole date because she will adore you by the end of it. The reason is simple: It is much easier to talk than to listen to others.

But the reality that just like in any relationship, one must listen to the other side in order to better understand them. Brands are facing the same situation on a daily basis. The holy grail of modern marketing is creating and cultivating relationships between brands and their target audience. Therefore, listening is a key to reaching this goal

Thankfully, several companies are offering listening and monitoring platforms that makes this task easy. We’ve chosen Tra.cx due to their great team, technology, and customer service.

Conversation Distribution by Platforms via Tra.cx

But technology is not enough. It is all about what you do with it. So, with no further ado, here are some of the key ways to use listening as a strategic tool in your digital marketing toolbox:

Tweak your product and pitch – by listening to target audience conversations, we have been able to gain insight about general topics of interest. For example, when listening to online discussions of IT managers, we were able to ascertain their key concerns and challenges. This provided valuable input to our client, as they could fine-tune their pitch and online presence.

Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing – one of our clients invested a lot of money in extending the warranty of their products. They saw it as a key way to differentiate themselves from their competition. A month after they launched their program we analyzed online discussions of potential buyers of their equipment, and saw that warranty was not mentioned as a key decision factor. Not only that, but we also saw that the amount of online conversations about their offering didn’t change at all after launching their extended warranty.. These findings helped our client reach a decision regarding the efficacy and value of their new marketing program.

Prioritize your marketing efforts – the digital landscape is becoming more and more fragmented. Multiple social networks, the need to combine inbound and outbound marketing methods, the ever growing pressure to reach results, and the shrinking marketing budgets pose a challenge to every decision maker. The value of Inbound marketing increases based on corporate investment. This investment grows based on the amount of platforms and campaigns a company is managing at any given time. Therefore, prioritizing and choosing which platform to focus on is extremely important. By effectively listening to online conversations about your market, you can easily identify the hotspots that require attention. For some, LinkedIn is the key to success. Others prefer Facebook, and others still – heaven forbid —continue to use good old fashioned forums to discuss their buying decisions. We are using a cool Tra.cx report to quickly plan and prioritize our marketing efforts, and make sure we are handling the most important platforms for our clients.

Listening in love — and in marketing — is a key to success. It is not a one time thing, but should be part of an ongoing process interwoven in the world of digital marketing. We gave here only a couple of examples on how to use it strategically. Stay tuned for future posts with additional case studies. And in the meantime, we would love to hear your insights.

You have a strong passion for media, marketing, and getting others excited. You are a hard working self starter and motivated individual, who get things done. You solve problems, and are considered an out of the box and creative thinker.

You are tech savvy and a social media enthusiast with REAL followers on twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. You speak Hebrew and English fluently. And you love all things beautiful, and appreciate the importance of visual elements in everything we do.

It would be also great if you have project or account management experience, B2B or B2C marketing know how, you love all things Mac, have video editing, directing or shooting experience and you are an active blogger

We are a B2B/B2C digital agency, with publicly traded international customers, that is expanding its operation. We believe that the relations between brands, companies and customers are changing fundamentally, and there is a need for a new breed of marketeers that understand different platforms, know how to integrate them, and how to create value to for customers and brands/companies alike. We also believe that there are new ways to communicate with customers, that doesn’t necessarily require buying expensive media.

If we work together, you will create and execute multi-platform digital and real life activities that challenge traditional advertising and PR industry.

If you’d like to apply – send us your CV. It can be video, images, or plain old paper. You can find us at Jobs AT pravdam.com or on Facebook (Kfir Pravda)

One of my best friends decided to make a move and start blogging. He asked for my guidance, and instead of keeping it between us, I decided to post it here. So, here we go – welcome to the Ten Minutes Blogging School:

1. Choose a Platform – you are looking for a combination of flexibility and stability. Flexibility is the ability to add widgets, video players, badges and so on. Stability is the total uptime of the system. Therefore you need a well known service. I am using wordpress.com as it offers a good enough flexibility (they approve every application separately so not everything is working on their platfor

ailable for the WordPress platform but not implemented in wordpress.com

2. Buy a Domain – so now you have a blog in wordpress.com. Its address looks like xxxx.wordpress.com. You don’t want that. Buy a domain (from Godady for example), upgrade your wordpress.com account by buying 10 credits ($10), and redirect the blog to that address. So instead of having a long and annoying address, you will have one tailored for you. It is very important to get this thing done first – so all the links to your blog from external resources will be done to the new URL.

3. Go to Feedburner and create an RSS feed – find the RSS feed address that wordpress.com gives you and “burn” it with Feedburner to get an independent RSS feed. The reason is that your RSS address is very important in order to maintain readership over time. If tomorrow you will decide to move to your own hosted wordpress platform, or change your bloggin infrastructure, you will still need to keep the original RSS feed address.

4. Choose the template you like and start writing!

That’s it for the technical stuff. Now for the real thing – Community and Promotion

5. Identify other blogs and sites in the same topics. Comment on them regularly with your blog address in the identification. other readers will find your blog this way, and you will get more incoming links

6. Add your blog link to your Facebook profile, and import its RSS feed to your notes. You can also open a Facebook group and invite your friends to it. Use it to keep in touch with your readers.

7. Add the blog to your Linkedin profile, in case it is relevant to your business, or you believe your business contacts will be interested in it.

8. If you are on Twitter, use TwitterFeed to push your post to your Twitter friends. Use it carefully, and try to communicate using Twitter for other topics as well.

10. Answer your comments – it is the way your readers communicate with you. It takes time but it worth the effort.

Is that it?

No, there are many strategies, and technics to write and promote a blog. But these things are the basics to get you going. Remember – write about your passion, you will have the best posts if you’ll do that.

Many people don’t have time to use social networks. They are too busy with emails, phone calls and face to face meetings, in order to get engaged – whether it’s work or fun. This is a major issue for most people who are trying to use social media tools as part of their business tool box.

I’ve went through several phases in my social media activities, starting with first limited steps in social networks such as LinkedIn, moving to the interactive Facebook, and using the hyper-interactive Twitter. Over time I found that I am investing a lot in communicating, on the expense of being the most effective and efficient in my communication and work. One of the causes of this phenomena is the overload social networks and tools are putting on all of us, with multiple updates and feeds.

Also, the amount of my connections affects my communication pattern as I wrote in the past. Therefore, in the recent months I’ve changed my communication pattern to better fit my needs, and support my other activities.

However, social networks and social media in general provide great business benefits if handled correctly.

In a business, I don’t believe that conversation is the most important thing. Efficiency and effectiveness are the goals of every business, in order to successfully compete in the market.

How can you balance between the social media noise, and the hidden value in its tools?

Here are my tips on how to do that. Would love to hear on how you are doing it:

If you are the ADD type, already involved in more networks then you can handle:

Separate leisure and work – you know that time in day when you are not focused? Sometimes you’ll go to Facebook and check what’s going on there, get into a conversation, read some notes, and just go around the network. It is ok – if you decided that you are willing to invest your free time in having fun in Facebook. Would you do something else that is fun right now, not online, if you had the chance? If the answer is yes, then everything is ok. If the answer is no – read a blog or a newspaper to relax your brain. Social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter, can suck you in and make you loose sense of time. And you don’t want that in on working hours.

Aggregate feeds from various social networks using Friendfeed or Spokeo – these tools aggregate activities of your connections from different networks in one page. It is very useful, and helps you not only keep in touch with your friends and business contacts, but also find new ones.

Kick out spammers from your network – yes, sounds logical, but it is not necessarily done in a consistent manner. When someone sends me 6 useless Facebook apps – it is time to say goodbye. After that, there is less communication overload with stupid interactions.

Understand when you want to communicate and when you want to do something else – A good friend of mine told me once, when I was all over Facebook, that there is a limit to the amount of interaction one wants to be involved in. At the time I thought he was dead wrong, but now I see that it is true. I’d like to interact only part of my day, and in many cases I need the ability to concentrate and reach a goal. Twitter, IM, and Facebook should be closed at these times unless they are used for the same task.

If you are not hooked yet, but understand there is a value in social networks for your work, and you want to be effective and efficient in using them:

Maintain your social network periodically – once a month, upload your contacts to Linkedin or Facebook and invite relevant people to your circle of contacts. discipline is the secret. You can reduce the effort required by uploading all your contacts to gmail or yahoo mail, and let the networks retrieve the information from there. It takes less time than uploading your address book to each platform separately.

Embed social networks activity in your work day:

Update your online address back immediately after you return from a conference. Connect to the guys you met as soon as you can. Size and quality of your networks correlates with the value you will drive from it. Foster it.

Add your social networks to your bookmarks toolbar so they will be easily accessible. The more you use them, the more they value you get from it.

Use social networks as source of information – whenever you have a question, don’t just ask google. Ask your network as well. You will be amazed how much high quality information lies in Linkedin and Facebook.

Spend 10-20 minutes of your work day for social networks updates. Go through Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter every morning to see what’s new and who is talking about what. I am doing it with my morning coffee. Friendfeed and Spokeo can also come handy, but go through the sites themselves once in a while.

Increase your networks’ value – connect to key people in the industry, thought leaders, experts, key decision makers and so on. The value of network is driven from the aggregated quality of its members, and not only by its size. Invest 30 minutes a week in looking for key people in your network and connect with them. It is worth it.

All those tips are completely irrelevant if you just want to chat with friends. But if you are business oriented user, I hope it would help you to get more value from time spent these social networks.

Some might see it as a move in the right direction, that will make LinkedIn more friendly to users, and even change the way people see this platform.

As I’ve said in the past, LinkedIn is mainly a dynamic address book. I am impressed with the speed that my contacts are answering my questions in LinkedIn, but it is still far from being a communication mean at the same ball park (not even talking about level) of Facebook.

Xing for example had profile photos from day one – and still it is used differently then Facebook, and provides less interaction between me and my network.

Each network has its place – LinkedIn addition is nice, too late too little kind of thing, and certainly won’t change the current social networking dynamics.

[digg http://digg.com/tech_news/Why_NOT_to_leave_Linkedin_for_Facebook/blog]Everybody are using Facebook. At least a lot of bloggers. And yes, I am there too. I am using it to communicate with friends, as well as my business partners.

It is the most efficient social network I know, and I spend a lot of time during the day actually working with it. I market events in Facebook, create special interest groups, and connect to new people. Linkedin seems to be a boring corporate product with no fun at all.

However, here are several questions I ask myself when I read these statements:

1.Does Facebook and Linkedin serve the same need? Not for me. I am using Linkedin as a dynamic address book, that helps me to keep track of my business contacts. I also use it in order to find and connect with new people professionally. I use Facebook to interact with my friends and business partners. It is a completely different need and function. One does not replace the other. If you want to know my job and contact details,contact me through Linkedin. If you to know me – connect with me through Facebook.

2. What can reduce Facebook efficiency and usability for me? Two main things can make me stop using Facebook – too much advertisement and spam. Considering the fact that Facebook needs to make money, advertisement will grow. Spam is controlled in the network today, but the minute I’ll get an unsolicited email, I’ll shut down my profile and move to another network. Which brings me to the next point.

3. Does Facebook treat me as a customer or as a hostage? This is by far the most irritating issue in Facebook approach. Linkedin sees me as a customer. I have ownership on my contact list, and I can export it to my outlook without too much effort. Facebook approach is just the opposite – if you want to keep in touch with YOUR friends you have to do it through the site, as they don’t allow you to export their contact details easily. And don’t start telling me privacy is an issue – THESE ARE MY FRIENDS. If they don’t want me to have their contact details they won’t connect with me in the first place. If Facebook cannot keep their customers happy without forcing them to use their site as communication mean, they have a problem with their value proposition. If they think they offer good enough service, why don’t they allow me to export MY FRIENDS’ contact details easily?

I am using and continue to use both Linkedin and Facebook. Both are good services. I hope that Facebook will allow me, the user, to decide what to do with my contact list.